Slack data import stalls out

We have about a 9mb slack export of public channels and messages, totalling around 180K messages. I’ve tried twice to import the zip archive to our server. The first time the import locked up at around 50K messages, disconnected my browser and actually rendered my instance inoperable. I had to redeploy it. the 2nd time I got about 2/3 of the way through and it locked up again, though restarting my instance recovered. Are there additional server configurations required to allow this import to happen and prevent this crash?